The Return Of The Deep Linking Question
from the hello,-let-me-explain-how-the-internet-works dept
I thought we had gotten beyond this stage already. I remember five years ago when there were court cases about deep linking, and I thought it was just because people didn't understand the internet - and eventually they would realize they were being silly. Apparently, that's not the case. There's now a case in Europe of the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association suing a news aggregation service for "deep linking" to their news stories. This is ridiculous. The point of putting up a page on the web is so that people go to it. If you don't want people linking to you, don't put up a page. Beyond that, it's very easy to technologically block someone from linking to you if you really want to be stupid and discourage people from visiting your site. Apparently the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association didn't bother to take the time to figure that out. In fact, they didn't even talk to the company they're suing - who offered to simply stop the service from working for Danish customers. There is simply no reason to sue about this. They are telling people that they've put up a website and they don't want others to go to it. As someone from the aggregator says in the article, "saying that other sites can't link to your site is like being a member of a community and asking people not to talk to you."
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Deep Linking
When I first started my website - which isn't much more than links to elsewhere - in addition to general research on copyright/fair use with regard to linking, I asked each and every "target" if they'd mind my linking to their site, article, etc. Every response (from those who bothered to respond) pretty much boiled down to, "Lift the CONTENT, and you'll be hearing from our lawyers. But LINK to us, you have our blessings. Another pair of eyeballs that might not have been."
So what if someone's first visit to a site isn't through the front door? If they like what they see after having been directed there, who doesn't know how to find and click on "Home," or chip their way up the tree by editing the address window?
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